Krishna
Richard Layman is famous for his horror books. Giving this one a try has taught me two things : that the comments from really famous authors like Stephen King and Dean Koontz that ‘You will have a good time with anything he writes’ is an exaggeration. If this book is anything to go by, he writes stories full of gore and even more of sex, and all his descriptions, reactions and characters are juvenile with very little intelligence or even awareness of the seriousness of their surroundings. When they want sex while knowing that they are in danger from a psychopathic maniac or feeling sorry for people who they know are liable to hurt them and ‘trust’ them is truly irritating. You almost want them to get what they deserve.
Here is the story. This is about five girls who have been friends since university and have continued their friendship after getting their degrees too.
Helen has planned a mystery trip for Vivian, Finley, Cora and Abilene. All they know is that they have to take sleeping bags and grubbies. Helen is a fan of horror novels. They go to an abandoned house in their vehicle – it is desolate, far out in the woods, and in spite of evidence that someone has recently been there, decide to spend the night there for fun. Insert all the horror movie / slasher flick cliches you know here.
He goes through the back story of how they became friends – defeating a senior student plot in the university to catch them naked and take pictures – and it is fun too.
When they go to the cottage, they find a warm pool heated ostensibly by geothermal currents and immediately take off all their clothes and wander through it. When they complete the tour, a man returns, sees them all naked and takes off quickly.
They reminisce about a very strict teacher in their university and how they taught her a lesson she won’t forget. Initially when they were scoping out the library, they were almost caught in the bathroom but managed to escape with a sock dirtied and dignity intact.
The story goes back and forth. In the conversation they mention some other ‘achievement’ (revenge with childish prank) against someone – this time a stern and conservative teacher called Harding. They go and paste nude male and female pictures in her room after a ‘tense adventure’ where they came close to discovery and expulsion.
In the present, they explore the upstairs and find all the rooms locked. They park their car on the side to prevent detection and also for a quick getaway. All the time wisecracking in the fashion of girls in a Layman story. Yes, the chatter is interesting like the exchange between the boy and his sister in Jeepers Creepers (the original and the best movie of the series) is interesting but it is all childish pranks.
Even Layman’s proficiency in creating interesting conversations cannot hide the fact that the story is all about reminiscences of past ‘revenge’ acts of the five friends. How for instance they kidnapped a bully who was rich and arrogant and had beaten up Helen’s boyfriend at that time – which necessitated yet another detour of how he and Helen met earlier – by kidnapping him and leaving him bruised in a building for almost a whole day, tied up and terrified.
But nothing happens until nearly half of the book in the present. By then the book feels like false advertising : It should be titled ‘Juvenile Pranks of Five Girls in their past’ – which will do nothing to boost the sales of the book. All weird worries about some creep only to resolve that it is one of the five friends returning.
They decide to leave when their clothes have been mysteriously thrown onto the pool. But they find that their car keys are missing. Sensibly, they decide to go in the woods and circle back and then stay somewhere hidden until the morning.
Just when the story is moving, they go into another pointless flashback on their Halloween adventure. For the first time, when they go on a juvenile revenge on a man who was mean to kids during Halloween (No, I am not kidding. It is that childish) they meet what looks like a deformed, stuffed scarecrow sitting on a wheelchair but turns out to be a man (under the care of the meanie.)
Now “in the present” when they wake up, they see Helen missing. They go back to the pool in search of her, but cannot locate her anywhere. The plot starts to – if not thicken – get slightly stronger that the watery mess it was so far. They go in search of Helen and find an abandoned cabin. When they go inside exploring, there is an explosion that shatters the windows.
They meet a man Batty who can ‘predict’ things and after a bizarre ritual involving the girls drinking their mingled blood, he tells them that the girl is back in the place where they had left. Sure enough, they find Helen but dead, with a knife in her belly.
They promptly go back to the past, where they were making an amateur film with some boys misbehaving and some boyfriends protecting them etc. Makes no sense and it is irritating that the author cannot stay in one place for long.
Back to the present, they decide to not run away but take revenge on the killer, whoever it may be, because the police ‘do not do shit’. They go to get the shotgun from the crazy man Batty and when he gets unruly, break his hands. He swears to kill them all as they leave. They realize he is a hermaphrodite. (This is, of course, of no relevance to the story but the author wants you to know).
We then realize that the whole backstory is there to tell us that they have been meeting once a year after their studies for a week as per their agreement. The first meeting was chosen by Vivian and it is to wander around New York. The third was Cora’s choice of the deserted place where they now are. (The second? We will see that later)
The ploy of passing between the past and future is a powerful narrative tool, as demonstrated by many authors, like Margaret Attwood in, say, The Robber Bride. But here, the past is trivial crap and it grates rather than adds interest.
Anyway, they make sensible decisions – for instance, to get the hell out of there and get help. But one of the girls sprains / fractures her leg and that plan goes out the window. Some realism there.
They manage to capture the boy Joe? and learn that it is his brother who killed Helen. Then they stupidly debate whether they should trust Joe when he says that he hates his brother and will help them kill him in revenge.
There is yet another useless flashback, this time incredibly of the girls watching their earlier escapades which we already know about and commenting on it afresh. This is supposed to be their second reunion after university. There they find and mass rape a barely adolescent boy. Go figure, the author needed some mandatory sex scene, I suppose.
They then gets James untied because Finlay almost drowned him. It is ridiculous that they bicker like children in the face of danger and second guess themselves all the time. They split up – great – and Abilene and Finlay sit on the hood of the car drinking before moving on with the rest of them.
They tie Jamie to a tree (with his consent) as bait and go up with a gun in the balcony to wait for his murderous brother Hank. When they hit and kill a visitor, they realize that they have killed Batty, not Hank.
The end twist comes soon after and it is very lame. The ending has some interesting action but then some weirdness too.
Of course every twenty pages or so, the girls get naked, or are molested, or do the molesting themselves to keep juvenile readers’ interest no doubt.
I will sum it up as ‘meh’.
3/10
– – Krishna